The European Parliament elections of June 9, 2024 demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the EU is beyond FUBAR. The majority of the EU citizenry abstained and the mainstream political parties sustained severe losses with France taking it straight in the chin after the clear victory of Lepen and Germany reeling after seeing AfD rise to second position overtaking the Socialists. The mainstream media rushed to plug the holes with the mantra of the rise of the "extreme Right", making the start of a common sense, down to earth dialogue with the voters impossible.
Why?
Because the establishment refuses to answer in a straightforward, simple way the questions on the issues facing the average European citizen who are labelled in a derogatory way bordering on insult as "populists".
In other words, once politicians are elected, they are elevated to the status of sages who know better than the people who elected them and cease to represent them but instead make decisions behind closed doors contrary to the popular mandate. Then they go out on mainstream media and try to justify their opposition to the populace in a non-stop word salad of mumbo jumbo Eurospeak refusing to answer the following simple questions while tightening the noose around the average citizen's neck with decisions the people don't approve:
1.The war in Ukraine
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1989, the newly forned Federation approached both NATO and the EU on friendly terms and asked to be a member of both organizations while retaining its national sovereignty. During the same period it received assurances that NATO would not expand Eastward.
True or false?
If the above statement is true then why was it turned down? If it is false then explain the reasons.
What did NATO do in response? Did the average European approve the Eastward expansion of NATO?
Was the transition of power in the Ukraine a coup d'etat or not?
Ask Ms Newland, and the DCI who were present during the Maidan uprising.
Did the Banderite paramilitaries commit genocide or not in the Donetsk and Donbas with tens of thousands of russophones dead in regions with a clear and undisputable majority of russophones who oppose a Ukraine hostile to Russia from 2014 on?
Was it or not the vision of De Gaulle of a Europe extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific that included the vast lands of Russia?
Is it true or not that cheap oil and gas from Russia along with the industry and productivity of the German people made an economic miracle in Europe possible? If Europe wanted to be independent from Russian oil and gas why didn't it do something about the oil and gas deposits in the Mediterranean, that would at least lessen the dependence but instead it let Turkey lay fabricated claims on the exclusive economic zones of its member states Greece and Cyprus?
What happened to the energy costs of the average European after the sabotage of Nordstream and the disastrous wave of inflation that followed?
Yes, Russia bears the responsibility of annexing the Crimea and starting the war in Ukraine but what would the EU have done in the opposite scenario, of Russians installing ballistic missiles in an imaginary pro-Russian Poland? Most Europeans feel that Russia was pushed to attack Ukraine so that the narrative of an aggressive bear mauling a weaker "democratic" Ukraine could take hold in public opinion.
Why did the Minsk accords fail?
Why did the Istanbul peace negotiations fail?
Was Russia responsible for their failure or were the Ukrainians coached by the Europeans to violate them?
There are billions of free euros available to a manifstly corrupt government of Kiev, but there were none for the Greek Italian Spanish and Irish economies in 2008-2010 who went through hell for more than a decade. Explain.
Western Europe has invaded Russia repeatedly in the past few centuries for the purpose of conquering and subjugating it.
When did Russia attempt to subjugate Western Europe?
In short, presenting the Russians as the boogyman, threatening to swallow Europe doesn't fly with the citizens of Europe and the populace is not ready to die for a war whose causes they don't understand.
The average European wants an end to the Ukraine war and a stop to the increasingly aggressive steps on both sides that bring the world closer and closer to a nuclear holocaust.
The accusation that whoever wants peace with Russia in Europe is a supporter of Mr. Putin and therefore a far Right authoritarian is simply nonsense. People want peace and they are worried about the saber rattling of NATO, the rearming of Germany and the continuing carnage in the Ukraine.
2, Immigration
When my country joined the EU I rejoiced. It never occured to me that free movement of peole, goods and capital within the Union, meant letting in hordes of Asian Muslims from Syria, Iraq, Pakistan Bangladesh, Kurdistan, boatloads of Africans and even South Americans to overrun my country in the name of humanitarian reasons which is a half truth when in reality these people came to Europe as cheap labor.
The problem is that they don't see themselves as cheap labor. Naturally they want to move up the social ladder, they want to preserve their cultural, religious and national identity and all these things are understandable and commendable.
You have to have a heart of stone not to lend a helping hand to people emerging from the sea, cold, half drowned, starved and abused during a perilous journey from their country of origin, victims of well organized human trafficking networks, that rob them of their money and erase all traces of human dignity from their faces, before letting them board vessels that are clearly not seaworthy with thousands of them, men, women, chldren losing their lives as a result.
However, over the years it is clear that these people don't want to be assimilated as Europeans but according to extremists among them aspire to dominate the native populations, in the name of Islam, this or that sect etc.
Islamic extremism has manifested in the form of horrific terrorist attacks all over Europe, blind stabbings and shootings in the streets of European cities, running people down with cars, and rapes, murders, robberies as a sizeable proportion of them have turned to crime in order to survive, abandoned in a limbo no-man's land to their fate.
They are frustrated and angry and that is undestandable. What is not acceptable is turning against the host countries that saved their lives and not making an effort to embrace and practice its way of life and value system.
It never occured to me that I would be branded a nativist in a derogatory way for being concerned about this situation.
The political leadership of my country, equates me and my ancestors who have shed their blood defending Greece, they have labored cultivating its fields and raising livestock, sailed its waters fishing, built its homes, schools, factories and churches, manned its public services, courts, hospitals etc with uninvited newcomers, some of whom look down on who and what we are.
I beg to differ radically.
It appears that many people like myself across the EU feel the same way.
The newcomers will have to demonstrate in a convincing way that they appreciate and love this land as much as we do, before they are raised to the status of a possible candidate citizen, and therefore equal to us.
What did the mainstream media and political machinery in the EU do all these years?
They suppressed whoever opposed what in reality is an invasion in the name of human rights and piled insult upon insult on us, the natives.
What did the EU do to stem the flow?
Next to nothing. The official mantra was "multiculturalism". In reality it meant: "Suck it in. we need cheap labor, Our young people are not having any children and we are headed for a demographic collapse."
As in the case of the Ukraine, there is plenty of money to take care of the newcomers but not for the economically eviscerated natives who never recovered after the bankruptcy of 2008-2010, at least in Greece.
The average citizen in Europe wants a reversal of course pronto and voted accordingly.
What are you, the leadership of Europe going to do about it?
3. The economy
I am not an economist but what I read is not at all flattering about the chasm between the theoretical goals of the EU, about unversal prosperity, increase in productivity and a bright secure future for the citizens of the EU that dominated the writings of most European leaders in the 1980's and 1990's and how this vision has unravelled for the past fifteen years or so.
I will stick to what I know from experience in my microenvironment.
We all anticipated the economic and monetary integration of Greece into the EU.
When it was finally announced that the euro had become the currence of Greece we greeted it with great enthusiasm.
However, it became clear almost immediately, that I would have to pay higher prices for my coffee, food, clothing etc. In effect, joining the euro meant a violent attack on our wallets because of the simultaneous devaluation that took place.
Nobody informed us that Mr. Simitis had made a deal with Goldman Sacks in order to get past the rules of the EU for adopting the euro by a candidate country. He might have gotten a bettter deal if he had made a deal with the devil. The EU officials knew of course that Greece was not ready to join. But they let us in anyway.
In spite of these shortcomings peolpe seemed to be doing well, the standard of living improved and everything looked rosy.
My neighbors drew bank loans for new cars, new houses on land that was outside a city plan, new clothes etc. All of a sudden everybody knew what the best French wine was, what Cuban cigars to buy, if you were somebody you drank nothing but 20 year old Scotch and of course the traditional Greek family life went out the window, if you know what I mean.
All this didn't start with the adoption of the euro. It was the modus operandi of PASOK ever since it came to power. It just accelerated.
Nobody was telling us during the 90's and early 2000's that all this prosperity was based on debt.
Anyone who, like Mr. Kolmer, dared to flash a yellow card on the unbriddled government borrowing and spending was labelled an enemy of Europe and people like myself who shunned debt and put down the phone on banks calling to issue us credit cards were "vegetables".
Who was me to doubt Fukuyama who had announced that the end of history was at hand and univeral global democracy had arrived?
Then the 1999 stock market crash hit.
This was the first hit. By this time everybody had become an expert on stocks and bonds and had bet the house on the market. As is usual in market crashes everybody was yelling and shouting that it was the short sellers fault, the Jews, the masons, the insiders, everybody but themselves for not doing their homework, studying the history of stock markets and especially stock market crashes and doing their due diligence. They didn't know the story of Kennedy and the shoe shine boy who had a tip for him on what stocks to buy. Kennedy figured that if the shoe shine boy is in the market who is left to buy his stocks at a higher price and he immediately put in an order to his broker to sell everything escaping the 1929 crash.
After a five year decline in the markets that had shaken most households in Greece, a recovery started and the 2004 Olympic works provided employment and growtth.
Everything looked rosy until 2008 when Lehman Brothers went under. I remember telling a friend thar this was the explosion of an atomic economic bomb.
We have seen the flash, but the shock wave, the heat wave and the radiation from the fallout would be more dangerous and lasting.
Unfortunately, I was right.
What followed was a series of disastrous decisions by the EU leadership who chose to save the bankers who had corrupted the portfolios of their banks by betting on derivatives that nobody understoof how they worked and went kaput when the housing and sub-prime loan bubble burst in the United States, instead of the citizens of the EU.
Due to the inept, self serving leadership of Europe at the time, the financial crtisis turned into an economic crisis with grave consequences for the peoples of Europe.
Greece went bankrupt a little later and along with Italy Spain and Ireland were the permanent subject of daily ridicule in the press.
The decade that followed turned my country into an open prison of debt slaves who along with their pensions, savings, houses, jobs had lost their self-respect and dignity.
A wave of migration of our best and brightest who left in search of a better life elsewhere was the worst consequence of the economic crisis of thw 2010's.
The succseeion of powereless governments of Papadimos and co Samaras etc just paved the way for the really disastrous SYRIZA governments with the infamous Katrougalos laws on pensions.
They proved to be a disease worse than Schauble and under the threat of expulsion from the Eurozone and closing of the banks, they promptly capituulated and signed one more bailing out agreement with the EU with the usual draconian rules.
The COVID epidemic dealt another blow to the economy and now the war in Ukraine is threatening to level what's left of it, in spite of the mainstream media stories that paint an unrealistically optimistic picture. Ask me and the average Greek how we make ends meet every month, with food energy and fuel prices spiralling upwards out of control, rent and property prices follollowing suit, the unfair, heavy taxation, the game of giving subsidies to households with one hand and taking it back with the other and a bureaucratic machinery that essentially denies me and others the active managemen, the ownership, of our property for ridiculous reasons. The national debt is triple of what it was when we went bankrupt, but it is "serviceable". Are you serious?
European agricultural policy is completely irrational and disastrous and nothing is done to repatriate the industrial producitve base that was exported to China. The green energy transistion is failing because it;s done too fast without a concrete plan after decades of procrastination.
In conclusion, the average citizen of Europe is dissatisfied with the neoliberal economics of the EU that increases inequality every day between the haves and have nots, the strategic geopolitical blunders that have been made, the globalist multiculturalism that has been pushed down our throats ad nauseam, the imported political correctness, wokism DEI and the distorted morals that we face in the name of democratic equality and human righs. The distortion is of such proportions that it renders the meaning of both concepts and ideals meaningless.
We are Europeans with definite cultural, social and national identities and we are sick and tired of being trampled on. We are back to claim what's ours.
